The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (22 page)

The cane was high, and that was the only thing that saved them. They hid in the cane, and for two or three hours they could hear the mulattoes riding their horses up and down the rows. Mid-night, the mulattoes gived up and went back home. They untied the horse Sappho and Claudee had left and headed him
toward Samson. The horse got here before Sappho and Claudee did. They took Claudee to the doctor early the next morning, and the doctor said the only thing that kept him alive was packing dirt in that cut. He would have bled to death if he hadn’t.

Mary Agnes was going to school in New Orleans when this happened. She told me that some of her own people was in this, and she knowed they would have lynched Sappho and Claudee if they had caught them. The law wouldn’t ’a’ done a thing. Creole Place was for the mulattoes there; everybody else keep out.

When Mary Agnes came here to teach school, the people at Creole Place told her never come back home again. But that was after they had tried to get her back and she wouldn’t go. The first time they came to get her, the old man brought his sons with him. All of them threatened to beat her, the old man even slapped her. But she wasn’t going back. One night the old man came back by himself. I could hear him round the other side begging her to come back home. They forgived her if she came back now. She told him she couldn’t go back, and he left here crying.

Tee Bob saw Mary Agnes the first time when she brought the children up there to look at his uncle. In the old days all the people had to go up to the house and look at the master in the coffin. If he was a good master you went; if he was a bad master you still had to go. When Clarence Samson died, Robert said everybody on the place was coming up there and pay last respects to his brother. They had to bathe and they had to wear their best clothes. The children in the morning, the grown people in the evening. They had to march in quietly, view the body a moment, then
leave. He didn’t want no whooping and hollering in the room. If they had to cry, cry after they had gone back outside.

Tee Bob wasn’t in the house when Mary Agnes came there with the children, he was standing in the shop door with Etienne Bouie. Etienne was the yardman then. Kept all the tools cleaned and sharpened. Fixed everything that broke. Him and Mr. Isaiah Gunn fixed all the firehalfs and chimleys you see on this place. Mr. Isaiah was probably the best carpenter this state has ever seen. He fixed that house up there anytime something was wrong with it. When that gallery started sagging he rebuilt that gallery and them steps. But he’s dead now. Etienne and Tee Bob was standing in the shop door when the girl came in the yard with the children. Etienne said Tee Bob said, “I don’t like this. Them children didn’t love Uncle Clarence. They was scared of him, and they hated him.”

I was standing on the back gallery watching them, because I had to let them in the house. They marched cross the yard like little soldiers. The smallest ones holding hands in front, the biggest ones following, with Mary Agnes following them all. Everybody had on their best clothes. It was October or November, and they had on the best coat or sweater they had at home. Mary Agnes was dressed in black. A black veil over her face—and that’s why I know Tee Bob couldn’t see her face that day. She was Catholic, like I have said, and she carried her beads in her hands. I opened the kitchen door for them and waited till they had all come inside, then I led them up to the parlor. Just the coffin and a dozen or more chairs was in the parlor, but they wasn’t there for the niggers. Put there for the white people to sit on later that night when they came to the wake. The children marched round the coffin and looked in and went back in the kitchen to wait for the teacher. Some of the bigger girls cried quietly, and I saw that girl, Mary Agnes, wiping her eyes, too. I
stood at the door and watched them go back cross the yard. I saw Tee Bob and Etienne looking at the girl, but Tee Bob still didn’t see her face. They marched back down the quarters quiet as they had come up to the house. They didn’t have school that day, they wouldn’t have school till Clarence was laid in his tomb. The people wouldn’t even let the children play in the yard—fear Robert might ride by there and see them out there having fun.

Tee Bob didn’t see Mary Agnes’s face till she came up to the house a few days later. She wanted to ask Robert for a load of wood for the school, but Robert wasn’t there. Tee Bob was in the kitchen with me drinking coffee. He asked me who I was talking to at the door, and I told him that the teacher from down the quarters had come to ask for a load of firewood. Tee Bob said tell her she could get the wood, but before he had finished talking he was already at the door. He had come there with his coffee cup, but he never raised it again. When he saw the girl he almost dropped the cup on the floor. His face got so red I thought he was go’n faint right there in the kitchen. After he had been standing there a while, doing nothing but looking at the girl, she nodded her head and went back down the steps. He stood at the door watching her till she had gone cross the yard.

Tee Bob stayed in the kitchen the rest of the day. Sometimes I had to tell him move out of my way so I could do my work. That evening when I got ready to go home he said, “That girl almost white, ain’t she?”

“What girl you’re talking about, Tee Bob?” I said.

“The teacher,” he said.

“Almost, but not quite,” I said.

“How long she been here?” he asked me.

“Going on two years,” I said. “How come you asking me all these questions?”

Tee Bob was going to school at LSU there in Baton Rouge. He went back that Sunday evening, but couple days later he was back home again. Robert and Miss Amma Dean didn’t know why, but I knowed all
the time. I just didn’t know how far it would go. And even if I did know, who was Jane Pittman to tell Robert Samson Junior what he ought to do or what he ought to not do when anytime he wanted to he could tell me to shut up my black mouth? Tell Robert? Say what? Hadn’t Robert done the same thing? Go to Miss Amma Dean? Say what there? “Miss Amma Dean, Tee Bob want mess with that teacher”? And suppose she told me to mind my own business? I know Robert would have said exactly that.

Tee Bob hung around the kitchen all day. He wouldn’t ask me nothing till late that evening. Then he wanted to know if Mary Agnes stayed on the place or left each day. I told him she stayed at the house with me, round the other side. He left again. That weekend he was back. Everybody was glad to see him, but they wondered what brought him back here so much now. Sometimes he stayed away from the house two and three weeks. A boy that rich had friends everywhere who was always inviting him to their place.

He went through the quarters looking for Mary Agnes. That was Friday. Saturday again, Sunday again he went by looking for her. Then he asked me where she was. I told him she stayed here during the week but she left every Friday evening. She had friends in New Orleans where she stayed till Monday morning, then she came back here again. I said: “How come you asking me all these questions, Tee Bob? You never did tell me.”

He went back to Baton Rouge that Sunday night, but Tuesday he was home again. Now he pretended he was sick. Sick for about an hour, then he got on that horse and went riding through the quarters. He didn’t stop by the church this time, he went all the way back in the field where the people was cutting cane. Stayed back there a while, then came back up to the derrick where he stayed there a few minutes talking to Billy Red. When he came back in the quarters the children was outside playing.

Strut Hawkins’s gal, Ethel, said Miss LeFabre had
kept her inside to put some ’rithmetic problems on the board, and both of them was standing at the blackboard when Tee Bob came in. She said at first it scared her to see him in there because she had never seen a white man at the school before. So she asked Miss LeFabre could she be excused. She had said it very low and Miss LeFabre didn’t hear her. Or if Miss LeFabre did, she didn’t understand what she had said. And maybe she did and just didn’t want to be in there by herself with Tee Bob.

Miss LeFabre said, “Can I help you, Mr. Samson?” But Miss LeFabre had said “Mister” the way white people say “Mister” when a nigger was there. Not like she felt she ought to call somebody like Tee Bob Mister, but you always said Mister or Miss in front of somebody like her.

Tee Bob told her he had been riding through the quarters and he had just stopped by to see if she had got the load of firewood. Ethel said he picked up one of the books and went through it till he came to a place where a page was missing. He asked Miss Agnes if many of the books was like that. She told him yes, but she always made the children read out somebody else’s book. Ethel said after Tee Bob had put the book down he looked at the hats and coats hanging on the spools against the wall.

“Nice and warm in here,” he said.

“The heater gives off good heat,” Mary Agnes said.

She asked Tee Bob if he would like to hear the children recite. They was already practicing for their little Christmas play, and some of the children had already learned their parts. He told her no, not today, but maybe some other time.

Now he just stood there looking at Mary Agnes like some little boy, Ethel said. She said at first she was scared to be in there, but now she felt like laughing at Tee Bob. If he was a man she would ’a’ knowed this was no place for her and she would ’a’ begged Miss LeFabre to let her be excused. But Tee Bob was not a
man. His mouth was too red and soft, his eyes was too big and sorrowful. His skin wasn’t rough enough. He didn’t have a mustache. He had never shaved in his life, and he never would shave.

Tee Bob went back to LSU the next day, but he came back to Samson Friday evening before Mary Agnes left for New Orleans. He had already figured out the buses. She couldn’t get the one at two-thirty because she didn’t let out school till three; so that meant she had to catch the one at seven o’clock. That meant she had to come to the road between six-thirty and quarter to seven. Six-thirty he went by in the car; Clamp Brown was out there and saw him. Clamp was courting Louise Ricard at the time and he was on his way to Baton Rouge to see her. He said Tee Bob went to the Three Star Club and turned around and came on back. Mary Agnes still wasn’t out there, and he went up the road a piece. Not too far—he didn’t want meet that bus. A few minutes later he was back. Mary Agnes was out there now; her and Clamp was standing there talking. When the car stopped and Clamp saw who it was he moved to one side.

Tee Bob didn’t get out of the car, he just opened the door. Clamp said he couldn’t hear everything Tee Bob was saying, but from what he could hear he knowed Tee Bob wasn’t talking about how he felt about Mary Agnes. Clamp said he heard him saying something about Christmas play, something about firewood, something about heater, but nothing about how he felt about her.

When the bus came up, Clamp had to pass by Tee Bob to get on the bus. He said he wasn’t too sure, but he do believe he heard Tee Bob call the girl’s name just before the driver closed the door.

Tee Bob kept it to himself long as he could, then he had to tell it to somebody, and he told it to that redhead boy there of Clarence Caya, Jimmy Caya. Clarence Caya and his brothers owned a plantation on the other side of Bayonne, not far from Tainville. The place was no more than a small farm but they called it a plantation—just so people would think they was in the upper class. Tee Bob met Jimmy Caya at the university there in Baton Rouge, and they used to come home together on the weekends. Jimmy Caya would put Tee Bob off here at Samson, then he would go on to Bayonne to his people. Tee Bob told him ’bout the girl, Mary Agnes, couple weeks after Clamp saw them talking at the road. But he had seen her many more times since then. He was coming back here just about every day now, and every time he came home he went riding through the quarters. He would go all the way back in the field, then he would come back through the quarters just when she was letting out school. If she stayed in there awhile after all the children had gone home, Tee Bob would talk to somebody in the quarters till she came out. If she was already walking up the quarters when he came in from the field, he would run the horse to catch up with her. Then they would come up the
quarters together. Him on the horse, her walking with the books and papers in her arms.

Everybody knowed about it now. The ones here in the quarters, the ones at the house up there, the ones on that river. From Bayonne to Baton Rouge they talked about it. “Reason he don’t show more interest in Frank Major’s daughter, Judy, there, he ain’t sowed all his wild oats yet. From what I hear, he found something on his daddy’s place. One of them high yellow from New Orleans almost white there.” The talk went on from Bayonne to Baton Rouge, both sides of the river.

One day I came up on them standing at my gate. Tee Bob up there on the horse, Mary Agnes on the ground with them books and papers.

“How you feel, Jane?” Tee Bob said.

“Just like I felt a’ hour ago, Tee Bob,” I said.

He just sat there on that horse. He didn’t want me standing there looking up at him.

“Thought you was in the field?” I said.

“I was,” he said.

“Judy at that house,” I said. She wasn’t there, but I thought he had more business at his own house than he had in front of my gate.

He turned the horse away from the gate. He didn’t say a thing to the girl. He wasn’t supposed to tell her good-bye in front of me, just like he wasn’t supposed to carry them papers and books through the quarters.

“What’s going on, Mary Agnes?” I said. “Now, you can tell me it ain’t none of my business if you want.”

“Nothing’s going on,” she said.

“You sure?” I said. “Now, it ain’t none of my business.”

“Nothing’s going on, Miss Jane,” she said.

“I believe you,” I said. “But I wanted to hear it from you.”

“He ain’t nothing but a child,” she said. “A lonely boy.”

“He’s a man, Mary Agnes,” I said. “And he’s a Samson.”

“I can’t help it if he want ride through the quarters side me,” she said. “I can’t make him leave his own gate.”